Dr Tania De Koning-Ward

Tania is a Senior Lecturer at the Deakin Medical School on the Geelong campus and coordinates the teaching of infection, immunity and responses to tissue injury to first year postgraduate medical students. She has spent nearly two decades in the field of infectious diseases and now leads her own research program within the Deakin Medical School. Here her research focus is investigating how malaria parasites are able to survive within red blood cells and evade the immune response to cause over 300 million cases of malaria and one million deaths annually, which predominantly occur in underdeveloped countries. Recently, in conjunction with her collaborators at The Burnet Institute and The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute she has discovered the protein pore that provides the gateway to hundreds of malaria proteins to access the red blood cell, which are involved in processes crucial to parasite growth and survival. This finding, which was published the scientific journal Nature, will have implications for a new anti-malaria therapy. Her research is currently funded by the NHMRC and Deakin University Grants and she is also part of a team that has secured funding from the Discovery Program of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (US$100,000) to explore the potential of some of the components of the protein pore as an anti-malaria drug target.

Tania, who was also born and educated in Geelong, recognises the importance of establishing a new medical school that has a strong rural focus. "It is very rewarding to be involved in an innovative teaching program that will generate doctors with a broad knowledge and skills base committed to working in regional and rural communities. In addition, the opportunity to contribute to the Medical School's research program and to find new strategies to help in the fight towards malaria eradication is very exciting".